Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Alison Smith Memoir Always Timely

6/12/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else—and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
Djuna Barnes
Born June 12, 1892
Author of Nightwood

D. Barnes

My Book World

Smith, Alison. Name All the Animals. New York: Scribner, 2004.

If I had had the time, I would have read Name All the Animals in one sitting. In this memoir, the author begins benignly by sharing with readers in great detail how close she and her brother Roy are at ages nine and twelve, respectively, so close that their mother names them Alroy. Together, they explore an abandoned house in their neighborhood. And then, in a similar way to how it must shock the narrator and her parents, it shocks the reader to learn of Roy’s death at eighteen. The rest of the book covers several years following in which Alison finishes high school. She demonstrates how her family, good Catholics, avoid all the questions that should be asked and tackled. Alison develops an inner and outer world of her own making, all in aid of forgetting and yet commemorating her brother. In failing to grieve, however, she cuts herself off from most people until she meets one she can’t resist. Smith tells this harrowing story without sentiment but with all due regard for the truth. She structures it in such a manner that readers discover along with her how she must grow up, how she must proceed without Roy in her life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What Is Art?

Mississippi In Depth

5/8/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.
Jane Roberts
Born May 8, 1929

J. Roberts

My Book World

Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Viking, 1996.

This combination of “travel writing, history, and memoir,” as blurbed on the back cover is a profound work. Walton, noted poet and author, takes the reader on a multilayer journey. One of those journeys may be the physical. He tells of the move his Mississippian parents make from their home state to Chicago as young adults to establish a better life for their children. One is always aware of the physical: the hot Mississippi summer days, the fields of blindingly white cotton, the cool of air conditioning and iced drinks. Walton takes pains to give us a full history of the state, beginning with the Native Americans who occupy the land for centuries before others arrive and kill or move them off. He doesn’t stop there but gives us a history of the slave, the African-American: lynchings, beatings, the cold war that Whites take up against Blacks after the Civil War. But Walton’s journey of Mississippi, which begins mostly after he is an adult, includes memories of visiting family there, interviewing a broad range of white and black citizens. He describes the “polite” way that citizens treat each other, as long as one observes one’s role. He also describes the fight for the vote, which continues to this day. Included in his personal comments are original poems of note that help to illuminate his narrative. History. Travel. Poetry. He appeals to the broad spectrum of human perception and sensibility. I regret that it took me this long to read a book I bought in 2006, ten years after it was published. Yet Walton’s message is still a vibrant one of truth.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's novel, Cleanness

Writing a Family Memoir | History II

3/11/2020

We must love our friends as true amateurs love paintings; they have their eyes perpetually fixed on the fine parts, and see no others.
Madame Louise d’Epinay
Born March 11, 1726

Madame d'Epinay

[If you missed yesterday's post, please scroll down. This will make more sense.]

WHEN THE BOOK BEGAN
In 2012 I swabbed my cheeks to get a DNA readout from National Geographic Genographic Project. Briefly, the Project determined that my “deep DNA” was about 41% Germanic, 41% Mediterranean, and 17% Southwest Asian. The NGGP results piqued my curiosity about the three generations of Dutch (half), German (quarter), and Welsh (quarter) ancestors immediately preceding me.

HOW THE BOOK PROGRESSED
I wouldn’t know much about those people, except that my mother and to some degree my father saved everything, which brings me to the second stage of my work. Since my parents died in the aughts, I had stored away boxes and boxes of documents and photographs and negatives, some going back a hundred years or more. My intention was to toss everything I could, but I decided that I should examine every document before disposing of it.

WHAT I FOUND
Hundreds of letters my mother wrote (I’d never before read them); letters my grandfather wrote to his hometown newspaper from France when he fought in WWI, with naïve but fresh descriptions of the Atlantic, the British and the French people; letters to and from other relatives; a dozen issues of Jayhawkerinfrance, a newspaper published by my grandfather’s Kansas Army regiment tracing their movements through France; journals my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my great-grandmother kept, as well as my father’s journal covering the two and a half years he spent in the South Pacific during World War II. In addition, I located newspaper cuttings that pertained to many family members, including ornately written obituaries from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I came upon creative writing; art work; photographs, and much more revealing the joys and heartaches of my family.

WHAT I DID WITH THE INFORMATION
First, I felt compelled to write about my nuclear family, portraying how my parents (both with rather nonnurturing mothers) raised my brother and sister and me. I felt compelled to tell about my sister with Down syndrome and how her disabilities affected our family life, both positive and negative. I included a chapter about the tiny house (750 square feet) where I grew up, almost a character in its own right, a dark dwelling where many sad yet joyous things happened. In another section I write about my parents’ youth: my mother’s life on a farm in Kansas; my father’s life in suburban New York City. In the next section, I write about my maternal grandmother and her parents, a great-grandmother who suffers the loss of her first husband to a flood. I write about my maternal grandfather and his parents, even my third-great-grandfather who hails from Wales in 1790 (consulting several books having been written about him by other relatives). I then turn to my father’s parents and their parents, who live in Breda, Holland for many generations before my grandparents emigrate to the US. From my memory and from documents and from extrapolation I glean instances of abuse, premature deaths that cripple the family, shotgun weddings, mysterious decisions (like not placing my grandfather’s name on his crypt in New York), psychological and physical illness, severed hands and time spent in hospitals, missed opportunities for education, and much more. In the fourth section I return to revisit ghosts of my sister and my parents, once again bringing up the past but in an atmosphere of forgiveness, seeing everyone in his or her full humanity. Acceptance.

WHERE I AM NOW
I have written four drafts. In the first I submitted, over a two-year period, one chapter per month, to my writing group. After studying their critiques, I wrote a second draft; this time returning to my research to include information that had, the first time around, seemed irrelevant. In the third draft, I finally abandoned the idea of directly addressing each ancestor and relied on first and third person. Now, most recently, I realized, finally, that the inner chapters were not presented in the most felicitous order, so I am reordering them and dealing with the ripples that such a change makes. I feel close to the end, having read the six-hundred-page MS aloud multiple times for rhythm and to eliminate clunky language, not to mention other errors that only seem to rise to the surface when read aloud (such as omitted articles or verbs). I am ready to give birth to this monster and hope to wrap things up as soon as the thing presents itself to me. I have never enjoyed writing a book as much as this one, but I am ready to be done and move on!

I shall keep you informed!

Take a look at members of my tribe in the slideshow below.

FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert P. Watson's The Nazi Titanic

Sorry for Not Writing Sooner

3/10/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I'm Mexican-American, but for a long time I was pushed out of any references to Mexican-American writers. It was easier to come out as a gay man than it was to come out as a Mexican-American.
John Rechy
Born March 10, 1931

J. Rechy

Writing a Family History | memoir I

Usually when I decide not to post for any length of time I give my readers a heads up, but this time I forgot. I offer my apologies to those who’ve missed me. To those who haven’t, meh. :) So where have I been?

On February 3, I arrived once again at Hacienda María on the grounds of the Native American Seed Company near Junction, Texas—and didn't return home until February 29. Although the company’s main agenda is to raise and sell native grass and wildflower seeds worldwide, they also offer two dwellings as part of their eco-tourism enterprise. Cool River Cabin is located down in the valley and a bit closer to the Llano River, where one can kayak and canoe. For the third time now, I’ve stayed in the Hacienda, a beautiful sort of mini-villa high atop a ridge overlooking the verdant fields and woods of the farm and river valley. My first morning there, a fog rose from the river and engulfed everything in its mist. Each day I hiked at least twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, in order to reach my goal of 10,000 steps.

Now I didn’t go just for the gorgeous, pastoral environment, but went there to finish a book I’ve been working on since 2016. Each of the three visits to Hacienda, I’ve toiled steadily through each day, seven days a week, to bring this tome to its conclusion, anywhere from five to seven hours a day—and yet it is still not done (I keep those same hours when I work at home). I chose to watch little TV (two films, Judy and Jojo Rabbit), didn’t necessarily carry my phone with me or play music. February was a beautiful month in the Hill Country. When I partook of my five o’clock constitutional, I would often enjoy it out on the patio in a breezeless seventy-degree weather. The nights were cool to mild, the days mild to warm. Only one cold, rainy spell kept me indoors for half a day. Groceries are a ten-minute drive into Junction itself, a Lowe’s. And if you have enough gumption to go further south, Kerrville has a CVS, an H-E-B, and a Walmart—about a fifty-minute drive on I-10.
So what did I work on?
I guess I’d call it a family memoir. How about I tell you more next time!

Before you leave, check out my photographs below.

TOMORROW: Writing a Family History | Memoir II

'Home Work" Quite a Ride

1/24/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
Pierre Beaumarchais
Born January 24, 1732

P. Beaumarchais

MY BOOK WORLD

Andrews, Julie with Emma Walton Hamilton. Home Work. New York: Hachette, 2019.

Andrews begins the book with a summary of her first memoir, Home, that came out in 2009, which is a good thing. It induces the reader to want to locate a copy (for the details must be juicy), as well as it gives readers a view of what her early life was like before she became famous and moved to Hollywood to work.

Unlike many memoirs which can be of a meandering nature, this one moves quickly from one locale to the next, one creative project to the next, one family crises to the next with little reflection, except by way of journal entries from the time period Andrews is calling to mind. Having said that, I believe Andrews moves from locale to locale because that is the nature of the business she is in. In making a film, she must relocate to where the project is being shot. With regard to each film there are preproduction stories, stories during the shooting, and then stories about when the film or live show opens—the reviews, both good and bad. And I’m sorry, of course, Ms. Andrews does reflect upon the relationships she has with her two husbands, her daughter by the first one, the step children she acquires (happily) from her second husband, her siblings and her Moms and Dads, plus the two daughters that she and Blake Edwards adopt from Vietnam. Julie reflects, but it’s often a hand-wringing followed, most of the time, by things turning out all right.

Still, the memoir has more than a few amusing anecdotes. My favorite involves one with Mike Nichols and Carol Burnett. The three are staying in the same hotel as Julie and Carol prepare for their joint TV special. He wants to meet late at night after his train has been delayed, and the women agree. They get into their pajamas and robes and when they know he’s in the hotel, they wait for him at the elevators. They decide it would be funny if they are kissing when Nichols gets off the elevator:

“At this point, one of the elevators went ‘ping!’ so I whipped Carol across my lap, making it look as if I had her in a full embrace. The doors opened … and the elevator was packed …. Nobody got out, nobody got in. As the doors closed, they collectively leaned toward the center so they could get a better view. Carol and I simply cracked up.
         Suddenly another elevator went ‘ping’; I quickly dipped Carol over my knee again. The doors opened and a lone woman stepped out, glanced at us both, and then hurried on down the hall. By now, we were both weeping with laughter. Carol slid off my knee and crawled behind the sofa to hide.
         ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
         She couldn’t even reply, she was laughing so hard. With a touch of panic, I noticed that the lady who had just passed us had turned around and was now coming back. Leaning over the sofa, she inquired, ‘Excuse me, are you Carol Burnett?’
         In a strangled voice Carol said, ‘Yes,” Then raising a hand above the sofa to point at me, she added, ‘And this is my friend, Mary Poppins!’” (76)

The elevator pings again, and the two women stage their kiss once again, “and Mike stepped out of the elevator. Without pausing or even breaking a smile, he casually said, ‘Oh, hi, girls,’ and continued down the corridor. Touché! ” (77).

Anyone like me, who has followed the career of Ms. Andrews from Mary Poppins until now, will appreciate the depths to which she mines her soul to share once again with us her life and her talents. It’s quite a ride.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

My Journey of States-50 Oregon

10/9/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.
Beverly Cleary
Born April 12, 1916
In McMinnville, Oregon

B. Cleary

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fiftieth post of fifty.

Oregon (2015)

Not only do I get to conclude my fifty-part series with the thoughts of one of my favorite childhood authors, Beverly Cleary, who lives at age 103, but with one of my favorite states. Ken and I arrived at our destination, Oceanside, in the middle of June, 2015. Our friends whom we met at Oceanside, had cautioned us about a sort of mix master coming through Portland, and we had studied digital maps galore, but we still managed to lose a lane and wind up for a few panicked seconds wondering where our car would go. It all worked out.

The four of us shared a lovely three-bedroom house on a steep hill. Luckily, it was sunny the entire time, yet the temps never rose above the mid-fifties. We were privileged to witness a double low-tide, in which more beach than usual was exposed, leaving a great deal of sea life visible until the tide returned. I captured a bit of that beauty in the photos above, also a few other sights we managed to take in along the coast.

Oregon was the 33rd state to join the union in 1859 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2009.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky   46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont   48. Montana
49. Wyoming 50. Oregon

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's Novel The Travelers

My Journey of States-48 Montana

9/11/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.
--Ivan Doig
Born June 27, 1939
White Sulphur Springs, Montana
Died April 9, 2015
Seattle, Washington

I. Doig

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-eighth post of fifty.

Montana (2014, 2015)

I first became acquainted with Montana when, as a child, I learned that a great uncle lived there, was superintendent of schools in Miles City for nearly thirty-five years—although I would never visit the state until many years later. In 2014, while visiting South Dakota, Ken and I made a day-trip to cross over into North Dakota and Montana. We returned to the state mid-June 2015, to enter Yellowstone National Park. A mistake tourist-wise—way too crowded—but still, we did attempt to enjoy its stark and majestic beauty. We hope to go back either in May or September one year.

Montana became the forty-first state on November 8, 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky   46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert Caro's Working

My Journey of States-47 North Dakota

9/4/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
—Louis L’Amour
Born March 22, 1908
in Jamestown, North Dakota
Died June 10, 1988
in Los Angeles, California

L. L'Amour

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-seventh post of fifty.

North Dakota (2014)

Our visit to North Dakota was rather abbreviated. We were staying in South Dakota, and one day we got in the car and drove to their neighbor to the north. We had been aware that much in the way of oil drilling was going on because big trucks with oil rig business would pass us on Highway 83. When we actually crossed over the border we saw how intense the drilling was. ND’s area is 70,698 square miles. Its GDP is $52.527 Bn. Forty-four percent of its population of 755, 393 is college educated. And its capital is located in Bismarck.

North Dakota became a state November 2, 1889, the fortieth state to enter the union.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky 46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Garrett Peck's The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath.

We Are All Beneficiaries

8/30/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley
Born August 30, 1797

M. Shelley

My Book World

Scott, Janny. The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father. New York: Riverhead, 2019.

Journalist Janny Scott limns a harrowing portrait of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, yet his story does not begin that way. Between the dedication and epigraph pages of the book appears a family tree extending back three generations. From a vast variety of sources, Scott brings to light the larger-than-life characters who are her ancestors, one set of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Most persons would not necessarily know that much about their people, but for generations this family live off the good fortune and largesse of Thomas A. Scott, a railroad baron of the nineteenth century. They live on one property, Ardrossan, larger than New York’s Central Park, west of Philadelphia. Scott’s grandmother, flamboyant Helen Hope Montgomery, is the real-life personage upon which Katherine Hepburn’s character is based in the 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story. There is so much spectacle in this family, people who can, and do, almost anything they wish to do, that we almost lose sight of the subject of the book, Janny Scott’s father.

At one point, when journalist Scott is young and becomes interested in writing, her father promises her possession of his journals one day. Through the years the promise is lost, both because she puts the idea on a back burner and because her father is apparently reluctant to hand them over. Following his death, from a long bout with alcoholism, Janny Scott unearths them in one of those hiding-in-plain-sight locations, where all she must do is recall the four-digit default household code to unlatch his trunk, and voila, there they are: decades of notebooks full of loose-leaf pages. Scott magically (it’s really arduous work, one must realize) gathers all of her sources, including this gold mine, and produces a portrait of her father, the beneficiary of generations of great fortune. Only, the portrayal of a human life is never that simple. The rich—we often don’t have much sympathy for them—have a uniquely difficult time in life. They often wield too much power for their own good, and Scott herself says it best:

“The diaries, I began to think, were an inheritance of sorts—unanticipated, undeserved, a stroke of fortune. But, like an inheritance, they came at a cost. Land, houses, money: Wealth had tumbled in my father’s family from one generation to the next. Each new descendant arrived as an unwitting conduit for its transmission. You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it, a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children. It was a stroke of good fortune, of course. But what you could never know, starting out, was how those things would influence decisions you’d make over a lifetime” (220)

In the epilogue, Scott makes clear that the Scott money ran out. Descendants of the railroad baron now live as far away as Los Angeles or Paris and many points in between. “They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse” (260)

As any good journalist, Scott knows when to remove herself from the story, always maintaining that important distance. At the same time, she lets us in on one of life’s greatest secrets, yet also a platitude, that money alone cannot buy happiness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-47 North Dakota

My Journey of States-46 South Dakota

8/28/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing fiction is . . . an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
--Rose Wilder Lane
Born December 5, 1886
De Smet, South Dakota Territory
Died October 30, 1968
Danbury, Connecticut

R. Wilder Lane

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-sixth post of fifty.

South Dakota (2014)

Ken and I arrived in South Dakota in early May. Grasses had greened, and some trees leafed out, yet on one of the days we headed for Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the sky spit snow in our eyes, and the wind shoved frigid air across our faces; the second time we returned, as photos above reveal, the skies were clear. Later in the day, we visited Crazy Horse Memorial, a thirty-minute drive southwest of Mount Rushmore.

South Dakota became a US territory with the Lousiana Purchase, in 1803. It achieved statehood on November 2, 1889 as the fortieth state.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Janny Scott's The Beneficiary

My Journey of States-45 Nebraska

8/21/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
Ernest K. Gann
Born October 10, 1910
Lincoln, Nebraska
Died December 19, 1991
Friday Harbor, Washington

E. K. Gann

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-fifth post of fifty.

Nebraska (2014)

Ken and I stayed at one of those nondescript road motels that begins with an “H.” The young woman at the desk asked me what brought us to Nebraska. And I told her that I was attempting to log visits to four of my last ten states. She seemed to have an inferiority complex about Nebraska which I’ve witnessed before. One time, I met a young gay man visiting Texas from Omaha. I simply asked him what gay life was like in Omaha, certainly assuming it was better than Lubbock’s, and he got all defensive about it, as if I were making fun. Anyway, I told the woman that driving north on Highway 83, we’d seen some of the most beautiful land ever. Northeast Kansas and southeast Nebraska are not entirely flat, nor entirely agricultural. There is a very pastoral scene there, even if a Nebraska waterway called the Dismal River runs through it. Nebraska, you’ve got some PR to do. You can’t rely entirely on your ‘Huskers to make your name in the world! You need a WillaCatherLand or something.

Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2017.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina 44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer's Less: A Novel

Theft By Finding: Root of All Good Writing

8/16/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.
William Maxwell
Born August 16, 1908

W. Maxwell

My Book World

Sedaris, David. Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. New York: Little, 2017.

Sedaris explains the meaning of his title right away, stating that in England if you find something, particularly money, you are duty bound to try and locate the owner or else you are guilty of theft by finding. At least in the beginning, when Sedaris is poor, he seems to find all kinds of money. Good thing he’s an American!

The voyeur in me always loves reading authors’ diaries and letters (email has obliterated the latter for future readers), and Sedaris’s diaries are among the best I’ve read. His mind is one that, for the most part, is completely unbridled. He learns early not to edit (in the psychological sense) his writing. He turns a trip to the market into a comic play. His desperate work situations, the same. He records jokes people have told him. He’s not a writer who stays at home, and, because of that, life serves him a big platter of human waste to transform into delectable satire. I marked so many funny or moving passages but I’ll only list a few nuggets here:

“Man to a woman he’d just screwed: If I’d known you
were a virgin, I’d have taken more time.
Woman: If I’d known you had more time, I would have
taken my panty hose off” (35).

“Edith Sitwell said that one of her favorite pastimes was to sharpen her claws on the wooden heads of her opponents” (112). [I cannot corroborate this anywhere online, but it sounds like Sitwell. Must have thieved it at a party.]

“Deodorizing puck = urinal cake” (130)

From Patricia Marx, in 1986, Sedaris gets a bit of advice we could now pass along to Congress or Trump about how to handle the Russians: “If we want a three-year-old not to put his hand on a hot stove, we do not beat him unmercifully. Rather, we teach him that a stove is hot, by pressing his hand to the burner for a minute or two” (155). We need to press Russia’ fat little hands to the burner!

While working as Santa at SantaLand: “Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but Santa’s also going to need a stool sample’” (278).

Sedaris’s entries becomes even funnier, in 1993, when his career takes off with Barrel Fever.

“Harry Rowohlt, the fellow who translated my book into German and is reading with me on my tour, told me that when someone on the bus or at a nearby table in a restaurant talks on a cell phone, he likes to lean over and shout, “Come back to bed, I’m freezing’” (391). This was recorded in 1991. Good luck with pulling that stunt now.

Of course, Sedaris’s theft by finding not only refers to the $45 or $50 or $100 he happens upon but also to the stories he hears, dramas that play out around him, whether they be in his family or at airports or in the marketplace. He records his thoughts on world events, Diana’s death in Paris, JFK Junior’s demise. He has something to say about everything, and I believe that is one aspect of his work that makes him a fine writer. Nothing is too highbrow or lowbrow for fodder. Step up to the trough and feed!

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-45 Nebraska

My Journey of States-44 Alaska

8/14/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The true measure of a man is how he behaves when death is close.
Alma Katsu
Born November 29, 1959
Fairbanks, Alaska

A. Katsu

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-fourth post of fifty.

Alaska (2011)

Saturday, May 21, 2011
In Seattle, Ken and I board the Holland American ms Westerdam and head for open sea. It is 48°. We’ve never been on a cool-weather cruise before, but so far we like it. The décor designed for the Dutch firm is subtle and nuanced, not garish like some other lines I could mention. The crew are polite and friendly but not overly so. Not long after we enter our stateroom, we meet our steward for the trip. Each morning that he makes up the bed he will fold a single white towel into caricatures of various animals. See photos below.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 – Sitka, Alaska
Our vessel is at anchor beginning at nine a.m. We will depart near five p.m. Our visit will be the length of a work day, and the group we’re with make the most of it. We all board a jitney, and a guide steps on board to be with us. At least three times throughout our day she informs us how lucky we are that the sun is shining and that the temps are in the seventies. It could be cool and damp, she says. There exists and interesting blend of Russian and Tlingit Indian influences that make the day memorable.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 – Hubbard Glacier
I’m not sure it’s wise, but the captain glides our behemoth ship in close to view the glacier up close. The deck is crowded with passengers especially on the starboard side. I’ve seen glaciers calving on film but never live before. Of course, everyone is bundled up, and we can see our breath while back in Texas the highs are in the nineties. I stare and can’t help wonder what kind of shape of this glacier will be in a decade from now.

Thursday, May 26, 2011 – Ketchikan, Alaska
We dock at 6:41 a.m. and undock at 12:56 p.m., making for a short visit. Ken and I actually remain aboard and watch the action from our spacious terrace. The town’s shops are painted a variety of bright colors, and I photograph the geographic features that serve as a backdrop: the trickling down of a waterfall, the fog, a thick green forest. It is 57°. I fully understand that we’ve only seen a small fraction of what Alaska has to offer the tourist this week, but I do hope to return one day and see more.

After a long and checkered past with the U.S., beginning in 1867, Alaska finally achieved statehood early in 1959, when I was in fifth grade.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | David Sedaris, Theft By Finding, Diaries 1977-2002

Metaphor from the Physical World

8/9/2019

A WRITER'S WIT

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
Born August 9, 1922

P. Larkin

My Book World

Houston, Pam. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. New York: Norton, 2019.

Pam Houston may be the single best teacher of writing in the U.S. today, not only by way of her classroom techniques (which I know of firsthand) but by way of example, and Deep Creek proves my case. Houston’s main tenet, always, is to begin with the concrete details—whether fiction or nonfiction—and those details will lead you to your narrative.

“I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories” (78).

Having studied with Pam, I can tell you she calls one’s paying attention to these details “glimmers”: that conversation you overhear at the market, the accident you see on the way to your doctor’s appointment. Your doctor’s appointment. Everywhere you look throughout your day, if you’re alive, you should be paying attention to these glimmers. Of course, they can come from your past, as well, but something from the past can be a bit dusty, so, once again, your mind must return to the concrete details. Houston says,

“I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way” (79).

And once again, as in all Houston’s stories, novels, or essays, she mines the glimmers in her life to reveal to readers her twenty-five year acquaintance with a patch of land high in the Colorado Rockies, at the headwaters of the Rio Grande, her ranch; the extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse her parents heaped upon her; the nanny, Martha Washington, who was more of a mother to her than anyone; obtaining the ranch property and hanging onto it by a thread at times, both financially and in terms of the physical world which, where she lives, has an extreme impact on human life whether it be the winter temperatures and snow and ice or a hundred-year fire or human encroachment. Many metaphors guide her. She lives by a purely spiritual (not religious) guide: What are the best ways for me to be kind to others and to the earth I live on, and how can I leave both better off before I leave this earth? Because of her childhood abuse, Pam grows up always on guard, always ready to leap into the future, and that is how she often lives: running literally to all four corners of our, at times, flat earth. She is invited or invites herself to some of the most strenuous and exhilarating ventures around. And in this book she makes each one of them shine, or glimmer.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-44 Alaska

My Journey of States -43 Washington

8/7/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
--Sherman Alexie
Born October 7, 1966
Spokane, Washington

S. Alexie

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-third post of fifty.

Washington (2011)

The only place I’ve visited in Washington is Seattle, where Ken and I embarked on a Holland America ship headed for Alaska (see my profile next week). But we spent a couple of days there before leaving and a day upon return, giving us a good feel for the city. I was surprised by the topography, that it gives San Francisco a run for its money on its steepness, known informally for its “seven hills,” like Rome. Hee hee. I loved the outdoor market, where you can watch the vendors toss a fifteen- or twenty-pound salmon to a paying customer, who’d better catch it. I loved the vibe, the fact that much public art adorns the city, that it was one of the first cities to raise its minimum wage to $12. And then there’s the coffee, ah, the coffee—if you like that sort of thing.

Washington was the forty-second state to be admitted to the union in 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

My Journey of States-42 Utah

7/31/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.
— May Swenson
Born May 28, 1913
Logan, Utah
Died December 4, 1989

M. Swenson

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-second post of fifty.

Utah (2015)

The first time Ken and I were in Utah the visit was rather unintentional, hardly worth mentioning, but I shall. We had booked a Southwest flight from Lubbock to Boise, one of us, ahem, assuming we had only one stop in Las Vegas, the western hub. Wrong. We wound up stopping both in Reno and Salt Lake City before touching down in Idaho. Our second visit was still sort of a pass-through, but, at least we spent the night south of SLC, in Provo. We ate dinner at the Village Inn, and the most interesting aspect of our dinner was that we were seated in a booth wedged between two young couples, both Mormon, we assumed, by virtue of their conversations: two-year service and such. I can’t really remember, but we clearly witnessed the two most innocuous heart-to-hearts I’ve ever overheard in a restaurant, especially for people in the shank of their youth. ¶ The next day, we stopped at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which totally redeemed the dismalness of the night before. I’ve posted a number of photographs of the birds we were able to snag while there. It was a lovely way to spend a morning!

It became the forty-fifth state on January 4, 1896, and celebrated its centennial on that date in 1996.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert W. Fiesler's Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation

The Corfu Trilogy: A Delight to Read

7/26/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Born July 26, 1856

G. Shaw

My Book World

Durrell, Gerald. The Corfu Trilogy: My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts, and Relatives; The Garden of the Gods. New York: Penguin, 2006.

In viewing the PBS Masterpiece series The Durrells in Corfu, I was spurred on to read the original material, and I was not disappointed. Gerald Durrell, youngest of four children, records his eccentric family’s doings in a rather unique and remarkable manner. In all three books--My Family and Other Animals (1956); Birds, Beasts, and Relatives (1969); The Garden of the Gods (1978)—Durrell wafts back and forth between two kinds of scenes. In one type, he writes extensively of his family: his mother, his brothers Larry and Leslie, and his sister Margo, not to mention a host of odd characters both Greek and British, who visit the Durrells in Corfu. In the other type, Durrell writes elegantly of his love for the natural world: spending entire chapters sometimes describing odd or unusual creatures from the very small to much larger, from owls he rescues to a stubborn mule he bargains for. I kept reading the 750 pages, with delight, until I was finished—almost sorry that the adventures were over. Well worth your time if a saga about a British family living on a Greek island just prior to World War II piques your interest.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-42 Utah

My Journey of States-41 Nevada

7/24/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
If women could go into your Congress, I think justice would soon be done to the Indians.
--Sarah Winnemucca
Born c1844
Near Humboldt Lake, Nevada
Died October 16, 1891
Idaho

S. Winnemucca

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-first post of fifty.

Nevada (2009-2018)

I have long held a disquieting feeling about Christmas. Its messages are mixed: on the one hand, it is religious celebration of the birth of a major religious figure; on the other, Christmas is the biggest Capitalist opportunity to get rich (or break even) off the back of that little baby born 2,000 years ago. No cognitive dissonance for you? Well, okay, I’m just built that way, I guess. Anyhoo . . . in 2010, when a friend invited Ken and me to spend six days as her guest in Las Vegas, we said, “Hell, yeah.” No tree to set up. No presents (the trip is our gift to one another). No holiday parties to endure. And we are now approaching our tenth Xmas in Vegas.

Nevada, itself, is filled with paradoxes: a state with nearly twenty Indian reservations yet one city with all the largest casinos; Las Vegas with its two million Bedouins living like city slickers; LV with its magnificent water features yet a limited single source (Lake Mead); a city of great riches yet poor souls passed out on The Strip, some with tin cups in hand; blazing summers yet AC that induces one to wear a hoody indoors. Lowbrow and highbrow entertainment, all in one city. What more could a tourist ask for? Honestly, I love Christmas in Vegas. There, the holiday is but a footnote, and that makes me happy.

Nevada was the thirty-sixth state to be admitted into the union in 1864 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2014.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy

My Journey of States-40 Idaho

7/17/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
Born October 30, 1885 Hailey, Idaho
Died November 1, 1972 Venice, Italy

E. Pound

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fortieth post of fifty.

Idaho (2008, 2010, 2015)

Some places you visit because you know people who live there. In teaching graduate students at Texas Tech summer school, my partner Ken introduced one of his female students to a young English professor who was teaching creative writing at the same time (I believe this to be true). The couple later married, and the professor was instrumental in getting me into the MA program at TTU. Before I could finish my degree, Ann and Daryl moved to Boise, and years later, after Ken and I retired, we visited them at their home, once in summer and once in autumn.

Boise is a well-kept secret, with a fine university. A river running through it (couldn't resist), in fact, a cultivated green belt for athletes, zoo-goers, museum attendees, and fresh-air breathers of all kinds. A great center for cinema, especially the Egyptian Theatre. A breeding ground for writers and authors. Most of all, a humane population. One night, after the four of us had attended a play at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival Amphitheater, the crowd strolled toward a huge parking lot. I figured, as in Texas, that there would be a huge push—cars streaming in all directions—to scramble to the closest exit. I was astounded when, as we reached a certain nexus, a four-way stop, each line of drivers took his or her turn heading for the exit. Ken and I asked if that was normal, and our friends quietly insisted it was. A state that uses a saying like “Drive Friendly” could sure learn something from that genteel bunch of Idahoans. Ken and I confessed that if we’d only encountered the place ten years earlier, we might have retired there. Of course, it just could have been a bunch of talk.

Idaho was the forty-third state to be admitted into the Union on July 3, 1890. Its state bird is the Mountain Bluebird, and it boasts a population of 1.7 million people.

HISTORIC POSTCARDS AND TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota 39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

My Journey of States-39 Rhode Island

7/10/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.
Galway Kinnell
Born February 1, 1927
Providence, Rhode Island
Died October 28, 2014
Sheffield, Vermont

G. Kinnell

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-ninth post of fifty.

Rhode Island (2003)

I must admit that Rhode Island is one of the fifty states through which I made one of those pass-through visits, as I did with Delaware. However, I feel a literary connection with the state because of one writer, Edith Wharton. If Ken and I had had time, we most surely would have visited her former residence, Land’s End, located in Newport and portrayed in her novel, The Age of Innocence. I visited her other home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts three times over the period of a decade, and so, upon my return to the state Newport shall be my first stop.

Rhode Island became thirteenth of the original thirteen states, in 1790, and its official name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Milkman by Anna Burns, Booker Prize Winner

Back in the Saddle

7/8/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers—to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.
Shirley Ann Grau
Born July 8, 1929

This and That

THIS: I haven't posted for over five months for the reasons I stated at the end of January. First, my longtime partner of forty-three years, Ken Dixon, was diagnosed with a BIG spur on his C5 vertebra which was crowding his spinal cord in a BIG way. In order to knock it off in the least invasive way, the surgeon came in from the front, and removed C6 to get at the spur and screwed in a spacer between 5 and 7, filling it with bone debris that has and will continue to make new bone material. The surgery and recovery went well, but being in charge of everything made me a very busy boy. The procedure, a corpectomy reduced his pain and stabilized his blood pressure, yet he continues to work with other professionals solving the riddle of vertigo. He's back in the studio for limited sessions.

THAT: I spent the entire month of June at a dandy place in the Texas Hill Country known as Hacienda Maria, what I refer to as a mini-villa that one can lease from the Native American Seed company of Junction, Texas. Just rural enough to enjoy the pastoral nature of the country roads, it was also a short six miles into town to buy groceries or mail a letter. ¶ I was able to read ALOUD my 550-page manuscript twice, literally finding my voice for the book. I made and entered in the computer numerous corrections, attempting to smooth out clunky language, as well as other problems which I shall not go into here. Anyway, I probably accomplished four months of work in one, putting me closer to finishing the monster.

MORE THIS: I plan to post regularly again, continuing my Tuesday/Thursday posts of A Writer's Wit, advice other writers have offered either about their work or the writing process in general. On Wednesdays, I shall continue my series, My Journey of States, until I have finished with all fifty! And finally, on Fridays, I offer profiles of new (or vintage) titles in My Book World series.

THE LAST OF THAT: A year ago I deleted my Facebook page primarily because I was disgusted with their cavalier approach to running a business. During that time, their corporate leaders have done even more to make me glad I dropped out. Personally, I believe the organization will have to shut down and do a FB 2.0 to build a more secure Web site from the ground up. Until it's improved at least, I remain a departed client. HOWEVER, I do miss seeing what's happening with family and friends. Drop a line, plee hee heez. ¶ I also deleted my Twitter account. I never was able to garner more than two hundred fifty followers, and, because I'd made the mistake of following some political operatives instead of sticking to purely literary interests, I was having to read a lot of negative stuff. It wasn't my followers' words but those of people "commenting." Negative. Negative. Negative. My only social media presence is now on LinkedIn, and if anyone can tell me how to make the most of THAT, I'd appreciate it. WHEW! I've said more than I wished to. I look forward to seeing and hearing from you as I regain my Internet presence.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-39 Rhode Island

A Dark Room Fills with Light

1/25/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
A bonny lass I will confess,
Is pleasant to the e’e,
But without some better qualities
She’s no a lass for me.
Robert Burns
Born January 25, 1759

R. Burns

My Book World

Faludi, Susan. In the Darkroom. New York: Picador,
2016.

One sign that a book may be spectacularly well written is that the author’s process seems inscrutable. In the case of Susan Faludi, she combines journalistic techniques of conducting interviews, whether recorded or not, along with long months, perhaps years of tedious research of all kinds, but finally she observes and interprets the relationship she has (or has not) with her own father. Yet how she weaves all these together remains a wonderful mystery.

Faludi’s memoir is comprised of many things: history of the tragic past of Hungary and Hungarian Jews, how that history informs her father’s life as Steven Faludi, her more recent life as Stefi Faludi; it is a journal of the author’s relationship with her father over many years, even years in which they neither speak nor see one another; it is a book about identity, how one can shapeshift to obscure oneself, whether it is her father’s masquerading as a young Nazi in order to rescue family members from being executed or whether it his change from male to female, whether it is changing one’s name from Friedman to Faludi. Ultimately, the book portrays the long, fraught journey that father and daughter take together, a journey that, at any time could be cut short, but because of some ephemeral formula, manages to continue until the very end, when Stefi’s very substantial constitution finally fails. This body—lying on a hospital bed in Budapest has sustained parental neglect, physical and emotional battles of war, marriage, and family life, abuse it has both endured and afflicted on her daughter, the physical and emotional rigors of gender reassignment surgery—finally succumbs to death. The author has flown from Portland, Oregon, to be with her father Stefi in Budapest, yet Susan sees that her father is resting, she decides she must get some rest at her father’s apartment. She is awakened by a phone call at six a.m. the next morning:

“Hallo,” the voice in the receiver said. “This is Dr. Molnárné.”
Yes, I said, unsure if I was awake or still in a dream.
“I’m sorry to inform you. Your father is dead.”
“What? How could . . . this be?”
“Some time after five this morning.”
“I see,” I said, now alert—and accusatory. “What was the cause?”
“Nothing special,” the doctor said. “She just died” (458).

As with the entirety of Susan’s relationship with Steven/Stefi, this process has not gone as it should. According to Susan’s thinking, she was to have located a dementia specialist, and that act would perhaps extend his life. At worst, Susan was to have been at Stefi’s side; they were to have had one final word of reconciliation before he parted; one final hand-holding while blood still flowed through both bodies.

An astounding book, where echoing off the title, the author takes the reader through many dark rooms, including photographic darkrooms, but others more sinister, to limn the lives of an extraordinary father and her daughter. A must read.

My Journey of States-38 Maine

1/23/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
Born September 3, 1849
South Berwick, Maine
Died June 24, 1909
South Berwick, Maine

S. Jewett

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-eighth post of fifty.

Maine (2008)

Ken and I drove from our outpost in Massachusetts to Maine in the autumn of 2008, just prior to the election. It seemed like quite a distance, at first. Could we really make a day trip of it? Turned out to be a little over a three-hour drive, what we consider a short jaunt in Texas. A friend from the area had told us we must indulge in a lobster roll or two, so for lunch we stopped at a large establishment that seemed to specialize in it (large lobster sign). Meh. It wasn’t anything to write to Washington about, but we enjoyed it and moved on to the Acadia National Park, where we climbed Cadillac Mountain. And then onto Maine’s magnificent coast and charming lighthouses. We spent the night in a motel, and on our drive back, half the political signs seemed to be for Obama and the other half for McCain, a prescient view of our present situation.

Maine, the twenty-third state admitted to the Union, will celebrate its bicentennial in 2020.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee 35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona 36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World, Susan Faludi's Memoir, In the Darkroom

Parker Posey's Memoir: on Gossamer Wings

1/18/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.
A. A. Milne
Born January 18, 1882

A. Milne

My Book World

Posey, Parker. You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir. New York: Blue Rider, 2018.

I must preface my remarks by professing that I am a HUGE Parker Posey fan. I luh, luh, love her work. I can’t say I’ve seen ALL of her films, because sometimes they’re not easy to find, but I have to declare that whether Posey is the kooky character in the Tales of the City series or featured in one of her other roles, she is a brilliant character actress who prefers those parts to leading ones; at least that is the impression she gives. Yet I believe that because of her power as an actor her best roles may yet lie ahead, if she can find the right properties. So say I.

Unlike many actors, who have suffered untold damage in their childhoods, Posey seems to have flourished because of the strong relationships with family members, particularly her parents, who encourage her in her creativity. Yet Posey does not make acting sound easy or even appealing. Rather, she shares in great detail what many of her film shoots are like, the actors and directors with whom she associates herself for weeks or months. The squabbles, insightful observations about the business of making film.

What a fun yet significant read! Part scrapbook, part photo album, part Dear Diary, part tell-all, part recipe book, this memoir reads as if it is a monologue right out of one of her films. At turns, kooky, serious, honest, even a bit mean (in a kind sort of way):

“I also started doing this thing when I drove around, that is completely obnoxious or funny, depending on who you are and how you feel: I’d roll down my window, get a person’s attention on the sidewalk or crossing the street, and call out, ‘Excuse me! Are you a vegan?!’ Or I got the attention of someone in a car at a stop sign and said causally (but a little too loud), ‘I AM A VEGAN.’ This was more fun in the passenger seat, when I’d get to hang out of the car. It was good clean fun—unlike veganism, which is hard work.

I get this from my parents—doing silly, unexpected stuff. One time we went on a trip and my mon wanted to stop at a mall for a shopping fix, so we went into a store called Spencer’s and bought some plastic masks. My dad wore a Nixon one, I remember, and my mom was a pig. They’d put them on as they drove, and we’d see who they could freak out, laughing until we made ourselves tired. It wasn’t cool anymore to drink in the car, so that’s how they replaced their fun. Not really, they still drank in the car, but in moderation” (189).

These passages seems so indicative of Parker Posey’s life: somewhat carefree, devil-may-care-what-happens-to-me, opinionated, fearless. Sort of her generation’s Tallulah Bankhead; in fact, I could so see her playing Bankhead in a biopic. Hey, Parker’s agent, are you reading this? Tallulah Bankhead, you hear!

Yet, Posey reveals what may be her true view of acting:

“It’s an industry (an art, hopefully) full of orphans left to create their own worlds with one another. I don’t feel glamorous, I feel like a possum—the animal born clinging to its mother’s tail, that grows up by falling off it, and probably too soon. Acting is the possum’s defense. Have you ever seen this? When threatened, they play dead—and they’re very convincing at it. They scare themselves so deeply that their eyes roll back into their heads and their little tongues stick out. They’ll even take it so far as to froth at the mouth They’ll go on with the act as long as they’re terrified and its truly ghoulish, because they’ve been known to be buried alive—they’re famous for it” (227).

And Posey doesn’t sugarcoat what an actor’s life can be like:

“A dollar seventy-five in my bank account, isn’t that too much? It doesn’t make sense, right? But all those independent movies I did in the nineties were done on the cheap. I was counting coins, which I’d put in those paper roll-ups to take to the deli so I could buy pasta to make for dinner. I didn’t know anyone else who was famous and broke” (288).

The conceit that formulates this book is that Parker is seated on an airplane and sharing her life with a seatmate. Occasionally, the reader forgets, until once again, Posey throws in a second-person address to this imaginary person. I say imaginary because I believe this person is really dead, or at least never talks back to Parker Posey. The format may or may not work, but Posey’s life is certainly quirky yet profound enough to sustain my interest for over 300 pages!

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-38 Maine

My Journey of States-37 New Hampshire

1/16/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.
Mary Baker Eddy
Born July 16, 1821
Bow, New Hampshire
Died December 3, 1910
Newton, Massachusetts

M. Eddy

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-seventh post of fifty.

New Hampshire (2003, 2008)

What I recall most about New Hampshire is that Ken and I were visiting in Massachusetts and decided to make a daytrip to NH, but a driving rainstorm kept us in the car, mostly. Sad to say that the other time we drove through New Hampshire it was on our way to Maine. NH—the Granite State and tenth least populous—was the ninth state to be admitted to the Union and celebrated its bicentennial in 1988.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World, Parker Posey's Memoir